Ivey and/or Blom still leading the way with 300,000+ stacks

Saturday, 25 September 2010

We’re down to almost a third of the field here at The Empire in the World Series of Poker Europe Main Event. There are but 119 players left in contention including the big stacks of Irish Open champion James Mitchell; Swedish online legend Viktor Blom; WSOP bracelet-winner Antonio Esfandiari and of course, Phil Ivey.

We saw Viktor “Isildur1” Blom re-raise from the cut-off and get a call from the initial raiser when the dealer laid out an A-T-T flop. Both players checked through the flop and turn before the raiser checked a third time after a blank turn and river. Blom bet 22,500 and after quickly counting the pot his opponent called.

“Finally,” we thought. “Someone calls an Isildur1 bluff.” But no, Blom showed A-Q and took down the pot to add another 26,000 or so to his 300,000 plus stack. It’s now really unclear who has the chip lead here; him or Ivey. We’ll know for certain at the dinner break but for now let’s just say that they both have a serious amount of glitter.

Speaking of glitter, defending champion Barry Shulman is still alive and well with about 75,000 in front of him. He is wearing not just a nice gold watch on one wrist but also his WSOPE Main Event 2009 bracelet on the other – a nice reminder to the guys at his table of what they are playing for.

Bluff Europe favourites Phil Laak and Liv Boeree still have chips, though the prettier of the two (not you, sorry Phil) is running low and will need to make a move soon. We saw Laak fold the king of diamonds to a 3-bet but he still has about 100,000 left.

Tuesday is the deadline for all working Americans to have submitted their income tax returns to the federal government and Juicy Stakes and Intertops Poker are set to mark this annual occasion by holding a special freeroll competition featuring a $1,000 top prize.

“We run a lot of higher stakes tournaments for our more hard-core players,” said Intertops’ poker manager. “But since our network is generally pretty soft, we created this series to give less competitive players a shot at winning.”